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SUS A N SON T
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Woolf, calling as it does for a return to the old novelistic virtues of
setting forth a real world, giving a sense of verisimilitude, and con–
structing memorable characters.
It
is
easier to understand why Sarraute will have none of realism.
It makes things simply too cozy and comfortable, this immediate
recognition that the life-like induces. Life is not that life-like, a modern
reader suspects. Truly, as Sarraute says, the genius of the age is suspicion.
Or, if not its genius, I would say, at least its besetting vice. I sympathize
with what she objects to in the old-fashioned novel:
Vanity Fair
and
Buddenbrooks,
when I reread them last month, however marvelous they
still seemed, also made me wince. I could not stand the omnipotent
author showing me that's how life is, making me compassionate and
tearful; with his obstreperous irony, his confidential air of perfectly
knowing his characters and leading me, the reader, to feel I knew them
too. I no longer trust novels which fully satisfy my passion to under–
stand. Sarraute is right, too, that the novel's traditional machinery of
furnishing a scene, and describing and moving about characters, does
not justify itself. Who really cares about the furniture of so-and-so's
room, or whether he lit a cigarette or wore a dark gray suit? Great
movies have shown that the cinema can invest pure physical action–
whether fleeting and small-scale like the wig changing in
L' Avventura,
or important like the advance through the forest in
The Big Parade–
with more magic than words ever can, and more economically, too.
Less easy to understand, though, is Sarraute's insistence that
psychological analysis in the novel is equally obsolete and misguided.
"The word 'psychology,'" Sarraute says, "is one that no present day
writer can hear spoken with regard to himself without casting his eyes to
the ground and blushing." By psychology in the novel, she means Woolf,
Joyce, Proust: novels which explore a substratum of hidden thoughts and
feelings beneath action, the depiction of which replaces the concern
with character and plot. All Joyce brought up from these depths, she
remarks, was an uninterrupted flow of words. And Proust, too, failed .
In the end Proust's elaborate psychological dissections recompose them–
selves into realistic characters, in which the practiced reader
"im–
mediately recognizes a rich man of the world in love with a kept woman,
a prominent, awkward, gullible doctor, a parvenu bourgeoise or a
snobbish 'great lady,' all of which will soon take their places in the
vast collection of fictitious characters that people his imaginary museum."
Actually Sarraute's novels are not so unlike Joyce's as she thinks.
One understands her rejection of psychology only when one sees that
what she wants herself
is
precisely the psychological, but (and this
is
